Joshua Davis, a 38-year-old Black/African American man from Houston, was killed during the early morning hours of December 7, 2022, in a shooting on Sam Wilson Street in east Houston, near the Fifth Ward area. At approximately 3:50 a.m., Houston police officers were dispatched to the 1600 block of Sam Wilson Street after residents reported hearing gunfire. When officers arrived, they discovered Davis lying in the street suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.
Houston Fire Department paramedics responded, but Davis could not be saved and was pronounced dead at the scene.
In the first hours after the killing, investigators had few answers. People in the surrounding area told police they had not witnessed the shooting, and authorities initially announced that they had no description of a suspect and did not know what had led to the gunfire. Detectives began trying to reconstruct what had happened before Davis was found, while the Houston Police Department's Homicide Division took over the investigation.
The investigation soon produced images of three people whom detectives wanted to identify and question. Police released photographs of one male and two females as persons of interest on the same day Davis was killed, asking for help from the public as they worked to determine their roles in the case. Investigators eventually identified the male in the photographs as Derek Sam Anderson. Houston police later stated that their investigation identified Anderson as the person who shot Davis. The two women pictured with him were subsequently described by police as witnesses rather than suspects, and authorities said they were not charged in connection with the killing.
Detectives continued searching for Anderson for several weeks after the shooting. Information developed during the investigation eventually led police to his whereabouts, and on January 4, 2023, officers arrested him without incident. The following day, Houston police announced that Anderson had been charged with murder in connection with Davis' death, with the case assigned to the 180th State District Court in Harris County. Anderson was 21 when the charge was announced.
Court reporting at the time indicated that prosecutors sought to have Anderson held without bail, pointing to previous felony convictions. Early court filings made public did not provide extensive details about the evidence detectives used to connect Anderson to the shooting, beyond Houston police identifying him during their investigation as the alleged shooter. No publicly reported motive was established in the initial coverage, and authorities did not disclose what interaction, if any, occurred between Davis and Anderson immediately before the shots were fired.
The case therefore progressed from an initially mysterious predawn shooting with no known witnesses willing or able to describe what happened into a murder prosecution after investigators identified one of the people pictured in their public appeal. Available reliable online reporting located for the case documents Anderson's arrest and murder charge, but does not establish a subsequent trial verdict or conviction. The publicly documented criminal case against him stems from the allegation that he was responsible for the multiple gunshots that killed Davis on Sam Wilson Street that morning.
